Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
H. said, Start again, Michael.
A lot of kids hated the idea that the priest might know who you were, but I took it as an advantage. He wouldn’t be expecting any big sins from a Downing. On my second attempt, I got through the opening without any problems and told Father H. I had been tempted to lie and almost had, but I hadn’t.
He said, Who tempted you?
I didn’t know he had the right to ask questions, so I panicked. I knew Marie would never forgive me if I used her real name, so I said, An older kid I know from school.
Father H. said, How did he tempt you?
I said I couldn’t remember, but I reminded him that I hadn’t lied, trying to change the subject.
He said, How well do you know this boy?
I said, It’s a girl, which was a huge mistake. I’d opened up a whole new area for investigation.
Father H. said, Why were you talking to her at all, then?
Now all I could see was Marie in curlers, chasing me with a hair-brush. I said, She’s a crossing guard. Our only crossing guard was Sister Jeanne Arthur. To get myself back on track, I forced myself to imagine Sister Jeanne Arthur wearing an orange shoulder strap. It worked. I whispered, And I said unkind things about my brother Joe to his face. I used his name for realism.
Father H. said, How many times?
I closed my eyes. This was a lot like Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
I said, Three. At least three.
He forgave me.
If this had happened at home, my mother would have been holding the telephone receiver in one hand and handing me the telephone book with the other so I could look up the girl crossing guard’s home number.
For my penance, Father H. gave me one Our Father, three Hail Marys, and one Glory Be. This was basically a belated birthday gift. These prayers were exactly what we said at home every night just to warm up for the Apostle’s Creed, five decades of the Rosary, a long praise prayer that began Hail, Holy Queen and a longer prayer “for Daddy” via the Sacred Heart, followed by the litany of the names of the nine Downing children, plus one uncle, my godfather, the one who had the troubled marriage that made it impossible for him to concentrate on my birthday every year.
I had to wait more than ten years for a godparent to do anything about my birthday. I was turning nineteen, and I had made two true-blue friends during my first year of college, though I really didn’t know it until they showed their colors on the event of my first birthday away from home. One was Perry, one of my two assigned roommates in a two-bedroom suite in Harvard Yard. The other was Liz, a sophisticated, generous, sardonic smoker who’d arrived with sophomore standing in English and lived two flights above us. Her affection was singularly heartening to me, and it was occasionally undercut by an inexplicable diffidence—just my style.
Perry was a six-foot-tall Japanese American football player from Southern California who intended to major in economics. We had almost nothing in common and no mutual friends. We didn’t even share a bedroom, though we both disliked our other roommate, with whom I shared a bunk bed. Perry never offered to trade off and give me a break from the other guy. This solidified my admiration for him. He knew what he wanted. If I’d got the single bedroom, I’d have traded with Perry halfway through the year and ended up resenting Perry as much as I did the other guy.
My birthday fell on a Sunday in May that year, and late on Saturday afternoon Perry announced that his godmother, Aunt Mary, had sent him a check to take me out to dinner. His aunt had previously flown us both to Washington, D.C., to celebrate his birthday, and she’d funded a number of other outings during which I had acquired a profound fondness for roasted duck. When I balked at the idea of a birthday celebration, Perry said we were eating at the Hampshire House overlooking the Public Garden. When he made the reservation, he said, he had checked—we needed ties, and they served duck.
When we sat down in the leather club chairs and took in the room and the view, I relaxed for the first time in months. I felt I’d finally got in to Harvard. We ordered mixed drinks—if nothing else, in my first year of college I learned that most people didn’t take their gin straight, as I had whenever I nicked a couple of shots from the dusty bottle in the pantry in Pittsfield. Instead of a toast, Perry said he had a confession to make. Way too quickly, I said, Whatever it is, I forgive you. He was a Lutheran, and I hoped he would take my word as a Catholic that he didn’t have to ruin a perfectly good friendship by telling me the truth about anything.
I have to tell you this, Michael. Right about now, a bunch of people are standing around in Liz’s room, probably with the lights out. They’re waiting for me to get you up there with some excuse about an English paper Liz is writing on Thomas Hardy.
I was genuinely surprised Liz liked me well enough to throw me a party. I was even more surprised Perry knew me well enough to whisk me away from the event. I said, I hate surprises.
I was elated.
3. False Pride
In third grade, a lot of my baby teeth fell out. It didn’t worry me. My mother said that none of the Downings held on to their baby teeth for long, and I was pleased not to be a kid in one of those other families that did hold on to things too long.
I knew there was no tooth fairy. Sometime during my stint in kindergarten, I’d spit up my first loose tooth while I was gargling with Listerine from my brother Gerard’s private stash. I didn’t ask Gerard about the tooth fairy. Gerard reminded people of my father, which translated into high hopes for his future, so he wasn’t expected to waste his time with his youngest brothers. Joe and I made him pay for ignoring us in mouthwash, cologne, and aerosol deodorants.
I had asked Joe about the fairy. The tooth fairy is against our faith, he’d said. Joe was deeply religious. So is Santa Claus, Joe added, and P. S., keep it all to yourself.
Joe was taller than I was and he had darker hair, and his only apparent disadvantage was a wicked cowlick he occasionally tried to master with a combo of the sprays and pomades he could dig up in Gerard’s bedroom. He was wearing his maroon cotton long-sleeve jersey with the fake black dickey. It must have been a Saturday. I was wearing my mustard-colored long-sleeve jersey with the fake black dickey. These were bought-new jerseys, and Joe and I knew they were more sophisticated than the striped things our friends wore. Out of modesty, we rarely kept them on when we left the house.
I liked the way we looked in those almost-matching jerseys. I knew Downing boys weren’t supposed to care about style, but I didn’t much like the way we looked in the wide-wale corduroys and cable-knit sweaters that came in plastic bags from the family of the man who owned the local newspaper, one of many prominent civic leaders who had been my father’s best friend. Whenever Joe and I put on some not-new clothes and stood in front of the full-length mahogany mirror in the upstairs hall, we could see that our knees and elbows weren’t where the previous owner’s joints had been. My mother would say they fit “like a glove.” She’d say this out of one side of her mouth. She’d be on her knees, a threaded sewing needle pressed between her lips, and she’d be tugging on a sleeve or cuff.
If I was in kindergarten, my mother must have been f0rty six, maybe forty seven. Joe and I weren’t pitiless, but we didn’t pity our mother any more than we pitied ourselves. I think we knew that anybody fortunate enough to be a member of our family was above pity. This was a matter of some pride, which was okay. As far as I understood the policy, pride was an indoor virtue that became a problem outside the family, like my favorite jersey. Pity was reserved for the poor and needy and other people who weren’t related to us.
We didn’t even pity my father, who was only forty-four when he died in 1961. And it would be almost two decades before I got a sense of how needy we all had been. My parents never had any savings. In 1960, they had put down $1,000 on a $20,000 stucco house about two miles across town from the small three-and-a-half bedroom house in which they had lived since 1947. There were eleven of us before my father died; the new house had six